You are a foot soldier in a revolution that never started, and probably will never end. You say this to yourself in order to get out of bed in the morning. Or at least, you used to. When all you had in life was a barrage of same-coloured suits, a kiss on the cheek from your wife, and a congratulation dinner or two every few months for your so-called ‘good work’ on something or other. You are really a bureaucrat, relegated to a soviet nobody cares about now, and which history will discard in the future. You’re not one of the big movers, whose ears seem to prick up at any mention of ‘pigs’ involuntarily, a dog conditioned to care about whatever big policy will establish communitarian (or rather, communist) dominance once and for all this time. You don’t want to be one of these movers, but you don’t want to live the rest of your life out this way. It’s not a bad life, and at least it won’t end in the way your father’s or your grandfather’s did. In all reality, it will probably end in much the same way as the great-grandfathers who preceded you, dying in obscure tedium. Where they work the fields, you delegate who works the fields for what purpose from a building most don’t even have the luxury of knowing. Your back hurts like theirs all the same.
Your breakfast is fine, always has been and always will be. At least it’s there, your father told you as a child, so eat up. You hate porridge, so bread and the current reserve of gifted jam (this time, it’s lingonberry, from your trip a couple weeks ago to discuss something or other on the thirty-fourth soviet’s agenda) is a welcome replacement. You put on your drab suit, tie your drab tie, and kiss your drab wife a shockingly-drab goodbye. And life would continue like this, forever and ever, maybe with a kid or two along the way, and a scandal that gifts you a promotion might just come today. But something else, someone else, comes instead.
Comrades, the Big Boss Pushkin (no relation, although that’d be nice, he always says) booms, we have somebody new joining our soviet, a replacement at last! Please welcome Aleksandr Vasilyevich, who’ll be working on… but the booming stops. For, just for a split second, everything in the world comes to a stop. The world stops turning, because you’ve just realised that he is the most beautiful person you have, or will ever, seen. You’ve seen prettier, cuter, lovelier people around, but nobody like him. You find yourself staring for a bit too long, too lost in his eyes, that you’re a bit late to the clapping. You can feel a nudge from Ivan next to you, who always says that you seem away with the fairies. This time, you’re away with a deity, Aphrodite incarnate, this paragon of infinite desire who you love after a single glance. Who could fault you for this?
Everything in you seems to come alive all at once: the fight of your father and grandfather burst at the seams, the romance they saw in the wars they fought flooding back into your life. And the entire world will be enveloped in this, if only you could go and say hello. You’re returned to your time at university, meeting your wife, working up the courage to ask her out. But that’s such a world away. You’re not nervous anymore- if anybody had the chance to say hello to Jesus, nerves couldn’t come into it. How could you ever live with knowing that you passed up the chance?
You extend a hand, introducing yourself. Usually, you do this while looking down, in order to pre-empt the follow-up questions. Yes, you are the son of him, yes you miss him terribly also, yes he was a great man. You don’t really miss your father. To be honest, he probably was a good man, he didn’t hit you much, gave you the ring which your wife now wears and never cleans, and did a lot for the so-called working man in your soviet. Your mother missed him a lot for the short time they were on different planes, and you miss your mother. You miss a lot of people, but it doesn’t really stay in your mind much. What surprises you, though, is the mention of your grandfather. The person who you, really, miss most in the world. Aleksandr, while vigorously shaking your hand, brings up your grandfather first. The war hero consigned to the sands of time, he says he wrote a dissertation about, well him and the other lost heroes of the February revolution. And your father of course, he hastily follows up with, what a good man. Why does he mention your grandfather? How does he know? They say the eyes are the windows to the soul, but even with your front door open, how could he know?
You thank him for the kind words about your father, and say that if you still have the dissertation on you, you’d love to read it, and you mean all of it this time. How long has it been since you’ve meant the words you say? Those phatic hellos, and love-yous, and comrades, and everything else for the last half-decade all melt away in his handshake. How do you make this real? How has he made you real?
You see this as a two-for-one: why not shed your reclusive persona, and get closer to a walking, talking saint? You bring your work and sit down next to him. You give him the lay of the land, as you put it. Which receptionists are nice, what you’re allowed to take home with you, how not to piss off Big Boss Pushkin (top tip, laugh at all his jokes). Every minute you spend with him feels like forever. No ring on his finger, a poorly-ironed shirt after the third day: he lives alone. You’re one step closer to Elysium. You discuss dialectical materialism, and how you don’t really know what it means. He explains it to you, in such a way that you understand perfectly, but also think that he’s the most intelligent person you’ve ever met. You sit together in the canteen, you get your poorly-reheated soup together, but in the pool of despair they call soup-du-jour, you find the feeling that he will leave you behind. You perform your job perfectly fine, nobody really hates you here, but nobody really likes you either. He seems to have this supernatural ability to put a smile on everybody’s face. Maybe everybody else realises his beauty, but why would they?
One day, a Friday afternoon where the canteen serves the only meal you really look forward to in the week, the singular refuge of cabbage and fish pelmeni, you work up the courage to finally ask him. He starts off by saying that you were right, the pelmeni here really is good, I’m from Novosibirsk and the pelmeni there is all a bit dry, the broth is strained off, and the ones at university weren’t really much better. This gives you a way in. You say that your wife makes a family recipe of pelmeni with soy sauce, her grandfather was from the Far East, if you want to come over and try it sometime. And on this Friday, your life all comes together. As if you were the conductor of his life’s orchestra, his eyes light up, just like you dreamed they would, and he nods yes so thoroughly, his five-o-clock shadow drips with broth as he thanks you, says that ever since he moved out he hasn’t had a good meal in someone’s home, and that he’s tired of restaurants and bars and standing in the dark over a hob that stinks up the whole flat. You laugh, not as much as you want to, and ask if Sunday evening works fine? He says of course, if your wife doesn’t mind. why would she? Anyway, next time she won’t be there. but that’s too far into the future. Sunday evening will be your apotheosis.
You spend the entire weekend preparing for it. You go out and buy a new painting, to make your front room look nicer. Not to say it wasn’t nice before, but it was barren. He needs to see you as a real person, so you make sure not to get something that looked like it was hastily purchased the day before. You tell your wife, and she doesn’t seem to suspect anything- in fact, she encourages it. She says that the only way to move up in the world is to befriend people. She sees you as a big mover, in the tradition of your father and grandfather. And sure, maybe in university that was a part of your life. It’s probably why she said yes. But you realised one day that there had to be more to life than schmoozing and boozing, than greasing people’s hands to propel yourself up. What’s the option? You work yourself to the bone for a semblance of notoriety, only to die at 60, take your wife with you two months later, and have a son who floats through life along with an estranged daughter who now lives in West Berlin with a husband and daughter who she hates almost as much as you. You’d rather settle into obscurity, serving the people well enough, loving your family well enough, and living life well enough until you die, well enough. Or at least, before your soul was set ablaze, this is what you aspired to. The first-year daydreams of something more to life seemed to escape you entirely before you met Aleksandr. Occasionally, you think it’d be nice to go back. But does it matter?
The day arrives. After a longer-than-usual sermon, about the virtues of whatever your wife will spend the next week talking to you about, you head home. You told him to be there for 6, not too early that it comes off as a cordial, meaningless lunch, but not too late that it comes off as a party. You need there to be a level of artificiality before you throw yourself in properly. Besides, he mentioned off-handedly to you that he sleeps at 10 every evening and wakes up at 6- this would usually make you jealous of him, that he had his life so put-together, but it just makes you love him more: how disciplined of a lover would he really be? The intervening hours while away, your nose in a book and your wife’s ear to the radio. You remember meeting the head producer of the new station here a few months ago at some cross-sectional dinner with the members of the com-whatever, saying that your wife really loved the programmes they had. When the producer prodded, asking what she liked, the only thing you could remember was the short jingle that they’d play every half hour, but what type of answer would this be? You do like your wife, but her obsession with the radio really befuddles you- apart from the one hour a week she lets you listen to the classical station. You don’t even really like classical music in the way that she does, but it’s one of the few things that connects you. On your second date, your twenty-minute tangent on Liszt and Lisztomania was what sealed the deal, you always think. This really was regurgitated from a lecture you went to on the history of idolatry. The lecturer was an odd man, and you remember reading a couple months after the series had finished that he claimed political asylum in America. As if they’d let him lecture on anything other than the natural sciences over there.
You hear two sharp raps on your door. Your mother always used to tell you that the way somebody knocks on a door can tell you a lot about them, but this was after the mourning procession had bandied their way around her house and not much of what she said made sense to you anymore. She never told you what it meant, anyway, so you go to open the door. It’s a very non-descript thing to you, at least. Outside of the stuffy work suits, he’s somehow even more beautiful than you ever imagined. His brown-blonde hair flows like a waterfall, perfectly framing his face like something straight out of a museum. The bottle of wine in his hand is cheap, but not so cheap that it would be impossible to drink. Better than the other things that people bring to your house, least of all vodka. Who drinks that with respectable company?
Basking in his glory, you almost forget to introduce him to your wife. His opening hello, hope I’m not too late disarmed you, since he was in fact five minutes early. What a strange man. What a perfect man. After the first round of niceties are exchanged, you lead him to your newly spruced up front room. The first barrier of impersonality has been shattered. If he wasn’t burrowed somewhere deep in your heart before, the way he talks ensconces him in there further. He’s so funny, and somehow your wife likes him. She touches your arm as she laughs as if to say oh my god I didn’t know that you were this well-liked at work, how did you meet this guy? No gesticulation could be an adequate reply. Nothing could adequately detail the infinitesimal chance of you two meeting, this one-in-a-million defibrillation of your life on its cold, bureaucratic deathbed.
